Remember Sapphire’s latest Edge VS series mini PCs? They were announced last month and with a choice of dual- and quad-core Trinity chips on board, they are pretty much the beefiest mini PCs on the market today.

KitGuru took the quad-core Edge VS8 through its paces over the weekend and came up with some pretty impressive results. At less than €400, the VS8 is a powerhouse, but it’s not perfect. Reviewers praised the compact package, low power draw and virtually inaudible operation. However, the 5400rpm hard drive didn’t impress, as it’s practically the only bottleneck in the system.

Overall though, the Edge VS8 is very nice piece of kit. It is relatively inexpensive and it wipe the floor will any Atom or Brazos nettop without breaking a sweat. In case the slow HDD is a turnoff, Sapphire will offer a barebone version, allowing users to install an SSD or hybrid drive instead.

Sapphire has announced yet another card that will be a part of its venerable HD 6000 series, the Sapphire HD 6670 Low Profile.

As you could have guessed from the name, the card is based on a low profile PCB and aims at the HTPC part of the market. Sapphire also claims that this should be the first and only graphics card available with such specifications with a single slot cooler.

As far as the specs are concerned, the card features 480 stream processors, 24 texture processing units, works at 800MHz for the GPU and features 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4000MHz. The low profile bracket features HDMI, DVI and D-Sub outputs and the entire card is cooled by a combination of small fan and heatsink that covers most of the low profile PCB.

Unfortunately, the precise date or the price haven't been announced, but we guess that it should retail at around €80/US $80 once it hits the e-tail/retail shelves.

Showing some more love for HTPC users, HIS has announced yet another card with a low-profile PCB - the HD 6450 Silence 2GB. As you can guess from the name, the card features noiseless cooling and comes with 2GB of DDR3 memory.

Spec wise, the HD 6450 Silence 2GB packs 160 Stream processors, ticks at 625MHz for the GPU and features 2GB of DDR3 memory clocked at 1000MHz on a 64-bit memory interface. Due to its low heat output, HIS used a slim, single-slot, passive heatsink.

The I/O part is pretty standard as it feature DVI, D-Sub and HDMI outputs. In case that HD 6450 is too slow for your own HTPC, bear in mind that HIS also recently rolled out a much more powerful HD 6670 card. The new HIS HD 6450 Silence 2GB is already available over at Newegg.com with a price set at US $59.99.

HIS has rolled out yet another card aimed at those looking to add more graphics power to its favorite HTPC system. The name is HIS Radeon HD 6670 Fan.

The new HIS Radeon HD 6670 Fan graphics card packs 480 Stream Processors is based on the low-profile PCB.

The GPU is clocked at 800MHz and the card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4000MHz, paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. The HIS Radeon HD 6670 Fan is cooled by a small heatsink paired up with two small fans.

The card features DVI, HDMI and D-Sub outputs. Of course, we certainly hope that those two small fans spin at low RPM as HTPCs are mostly meant to be silent.

The GT 520 1GB SilentFX can be found at about €38 and is passively cooled, which indeed is a big plus if you ask HTPC users. The card has three video connectors, one VGA, one HDMI and one dual-link DVI.

Geforce GT 520 boasts a 29W TDP and DirectX 11 support but it only has 48 CUDA processors (shaders). The GT 520 1GB SilentFX is based on the GF119, which is regarded as the most basic Fermi-based GPU.

The GT 520 1GB SilentFX’ GPU ticks at 810MHz, which is the reference clock. However, the memory stands at 535MHz (1070Hz effectively), rather than the reference 900MHz.

The packaging says that the card is part of Gainward’s GOOD series, meaning that Gainward designed its own cooling. In this case, the cooling is passive and dual slot.

The box holds a short user’s manual, driver CD and the card.

The cooler is made of a single aluminum block and should do a pretty good job. In fact, the cooling should do well in smaller cases too, if the dual slot width does not prevent you from using it.

The Geforce GT 520’s gaming performance is pretty low, which is to be expected. 3D Mark 2011 shows that Geforce GT 430 is better for occasional gaming but it also consumes more (Max. TDP 49W). Note that Geforce GT 430 cards are based on the GF108, which boasts double the specs of the GF119. Geforce GT 520 will do fine in hardware acceleration of HD video, but we’ll know more on that as soon as we're done testing.

Gaming is possible but only with minimum detail settings.

We measured a maximum of 69°C after lengthy gaming, which is pretty good considering that we tested it in a semi-open PC case with not much airflow. We’ll also repeat our testing in smaller HTPC cases so stay tuned.

As expected and hinted earlier, Zotac has now officially announced its latest mini-ITX motherboard, the A75-ITX WiFi based on the AMD's A75 chipset with support for FM1 APUs.

As you would expect from Zotac's HTPC friendly motherboards, this one also features almost everything that you would want from a mini-ITX motherboard including the WiFi. The full spec list includes a PCI-Express x16 slot, two memory slots with support for up to 8GB of DDR3-1866 memory (depending on the APU that you are using), dual Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB 3.0 ports (two via header and six in the back), four SATA 6.0Gbps ports, 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, DVI and HDMI outputs and 7.1-channel audio.

Due to the comprehensive feature list, we expect the new motherboard to retail/e-tail at around €90.

The Intel HD 3000 graphics and Nvidia's Geforce GT 540M will work together with automatic graphics switching over Virtu tech and it will even have support for Nvidia's stereo 3D tech. As far as the connectivity goes, the new Vision 3D HTPC will feature four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit LAN, HDMI and DVI outputs, and integrated 8-channel audio with optical SPDIF output.

Unfortunately, the price or the actual release date haven't been announced but we'll certainly keep an eye out for this one.

Zotac is one of few vendors to offer mini-ITX motherboards based on AMD’s A-75 chipset and geared towards the HTPC crowd.

The new board features two memory slots with support for DDR3-1866 modules, a proper PCIe x16 slot, alng with SATA 6Gbps, USB 3.0, HDMI, LAN, WLAN and 7.1 audio. Upcoming 65W Llano parts would be a great match for this tiny board, since we wouldn’t advice running 100W APUs in an ITX chassis.

In case even ITX is too large for your taste, Zotac also revamped its Zbox nettop. The new Zbox Nano AD10 measures just 127x127x45mm, while previous models have a footprint of 188x188mm. Like the Zbox AD02, which we recently tested, the Nano is based on AMD’s E-350 APU and available either as a barebone or a complete system.

A lot of people still care about desktops and the HTPC market, as many still prefer working on desktops rather than notebook. People still like the fact that one of the machines they have at home is fixed and that it has a proper screen. Well, at least many of us do.

This is why especially people who are after HTPC (Home Theatre PCs) might be quite happy with AMD's Ontario dual-core chip. We’ve learned that the desktop part has the same 18W TDP and some of the roadmaps we’ve seen have listed some 25W parts, a chip that is likely to be clocked faster.

There will also be a single core part with 9W TDP but we are not sure if this one will jump in and replace current K10.5 45nm Sempron CPUs, but at least the possibility is there.

Graphics pefrormance on Ontario looks good and this is something that will come handy in the HTPC market as it will be good enough to pay Blu-Ray HD video, something that is the most demanding for these users, and some basic games such as Starcfaft 2 will run just fine.

In order to keep HTPC users happy, PowerColor has decided to roll out a new low-profile HD 5750 that features a rather neat looking dual-slot, dual-fan cooler. The new PowerColor HD 5750 should be available in next few weeks with a price set at around US $25 more than a standard version, probably due to the special cooler.

The new HD 5750 Low Profile features 720 Stream processors, works at 700MHz for the GPU and 4600MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. The card comes with DVI, HDMI and D-Sub outputs and has support for AMD's Eyefinity. The cooler comes from Arctic Cooling and we are quite sure that it will do a good job in keeping the HD 5750 GPU temps at a decent level, although two small fans might make more noise than we would prefer.

According to our info, the card might end up on retail shelves as early as next week, depending on the region. The price should end up at US $25 more than a standard HD 5750, which means that it might retail at around US $150, or €130 in Europe.